Tag Archive: Korea

Last year, NASA posted a new high resolution map of the lights present across the world at night using the Suomi NPP satellite, which was launched in 2009.
While the overall appearance of the map is similar to those provided by older satellites, with a well-lit developed world and a global south shrouded in darkness, the higher level of detail allows a closer look at some of the smaller features around the globe

A River Of Fire

Along the shores of the southwestern Mediterranean lie the heirs of two ancient civilizations, whose modern cities are arranged in distinctly different patterns.

Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, we can see a web of Levantine cities in Lebanon and Israel starting from the coast and expanding back toward their eastern borders. The countries to their east, Syria and Jordan, have their urban networks concentrated around the capital cities of Damascus and Amman respectively.

Of course, one of the most striking features of any nighttime satellite imagery of the Earth is the glowing strip of lights along the Egyptian Nile, starting with the triangular delta and stretching upstream until it comes to an abrupt end at the Aswan Dam, built at the site of the first cataract, the historic separation point between Egyptian civilization and the Nubians of what is now southern Egypt. While there are some scattered lights in Egypt outside of the Nile Valley, those can only be found in the oases of the Sahara, whose desiccated expanse otherwise impedes the growth of sedentary society, serving instead as the domain of a small number of nomads migrating across its vast waves of dunes.

The utter darkness of Nubia is a reflection both of the population displacement caused by the formation of Lake Nasser with the building of the the Aswan Dam and the extent to which the Nile cataracts impeded the extension of Egyptian civilization southward to a meaningful extent.

Further upstream, there is little in the way of lights until reaching the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, which serves as an island of urbanization in an otherwise dark Sudanese countryside. With six cataracts between its capital and the glowing thread of the Egyptian Nile Valley, Sudan’s darkness outside of its capital is representative of the African continent south of the Sahara.Continue reading →